Tuesday, August 20, 2013

flame wars everywhere

News is all around us, and many of us devour upon it. I am a mild consumer of news.
News itself might be ranging trivial or funny stuff for leisure reading for people with specific interests to really breaking and important ones which everyone reads.

I occasionally get to read many articles from various news channels on interesting topics. I read quite less, as in I click on news articles in FB timeline,twitter timeline or in some news websites, only if I really get attracted to the headlines.

First I read the article, think upon it, and see if I agree with the author and his/her viewpoints depending upon my expertise on the topic. Then the mind seeks to know what other people or friends think about it if I feel it is something others might be interested in. So, I head over to the comments section to see the public perception.

The responses are interesting topic to study for data statistics and understanding the mindset of the readers. Comparing the responses to the same news topic in multiple media gives a good idea of the coverage of the media and the nature of their readers.

But there are also lots of news of high importance, for which the amount of public response seems strangely insufficient. I often feel short of content after reading some articles and wish to know what the general public reading it thinks about it. But almost all articles of interest to me garners no interest from the public that 'freely shares opinions'.

But among the few that do, I have seen such little useful and sensible comments that I subconsciously don't scroll down to the comments section for good articles. Take a news that even remotely relates to politics, war, religion etc and you get to the other extreme. There are lots of points, data and perceptions to read, but what spoils the apple cart is the flame wars.

Flame wars are fun to read upto some point, if the opposing sides have enough valid ammunition. But I have observed that most of the comments in the Indian media are very immature or sounds like plain propaganda message. I can immediately imagine a furious fanatic typing away on his keyboard trying to block the points made by the other side. The shit hits the fan when the topic covers sensational topics for no reason.

For this reason, sometimes I stick to respectable news media like The Hindu or some other foreign media for news that is of interest to me. Also I trust the category specific news feeds more as they don't tend to deviate from topic..